So I have a bunch of filters in place at my gmail account so that the important ones stays in inbox and others like update/commercial from amazon/ebay/my bank are filtered to their folders.
Now I need to set up a new filter which shall forward to another email address (not gmail) only the ones which would stay at inbox. Another words, I do not want the ebay email forwarded, but want my friends email forwarded(I cannot exhaustively add my friend name to a new forward filter)
I cannot think of a simple solution because gmail filter does not have "all others" filter option.
Can you help out?
Best Answer
Gmail applies all filters to all incoming mail (rather than in a specific order like most desktop mail clients). Therefore, You will need to create an additional filter that is the logical
NOT
of all your other filters. For instance, let’s suppose you have the following filters in place:from:ebay.com
put in folder eBayfrom:facebookmail.com
put in folder FacebookYour new forwarding rule would be:
-from:ebay.com AND -from:facebookmail.com
forward to important@senders.comThis can prove very tedious and error-prone, unfortunately, especially if you have many filters to invert, and even more so if they use complex rules. Here are a few alternative solutions that may or may not be better, depending on your exact circumstances:
To me the best option (and the one I believe best fits your conundrum) is through door #3, provided your email provider (senders.com in this example) supports accessing external accounts using POP. Most email providers do, and it’s very easy to setup:
If you’ve setup two-factor authentication for your Gmail account you will need to generate an application password, and use it instead for POP retrieval.
The biggest downside to this is you cannot control how often Gmail fetches POP mail. From my own observations as of June 2014, this is ≈ every 70mn. Old tricks to speed this up no longer work since ≈ 2013.